Are you a peace activist, disgusted with the endless war on
terror? A fighter for economic justice, alarmed by accelerating economic
inequality? A climate hawk or anti-fracker, pressing for dangerously overdue
climate action? An enemy of mass incarceration, and of racial disparity in
applying the law? An opponent of universal spying, police militarization, and
detainment without due process? An advocate for saner drug policy? Or an
opponent of money in politics, knowing big-dollar interests bar the way to
solving all the urgent social crises
just listed?

If you answered yes to all or most of these questions, you
are clearly a progressive-- and have we
got a proposition for you! And even if you care about only one of two of these
crises, you may find your force for action multiplied by joining a coalition of
progressives uniting to address them all.

You'll notice one important thing: our definition of being a
progressive had nothing to do with
being a Democrat. Today's Democrats have shamelessly exploited the fact that
the Democratic Party was once the home for most progressives by unjustly
appropriating for themselves an honorable name today's party scarcely deserves.
In fact, applying the word progressive
to 2016 Democratic presidential frontrunner Hillary Clinton amounts to outright blasphemy. Which brings us to our main point.

- Advertisement -

As this Truth-out article--a good recent summary among many possible ones--clearly indicates, there's almost nothing progressive about Hillary
Clinton. Then, what the hell business does she have being the foremost
presidential candidate--indeed, virtually the uncontested presidential
candidate--of a party that dares call itself progressive? With Hillary as
Democrats' uncontested standard bearer, shouldn't we instead suspect that
Democrats no longer have any place for progressives at all? Indeed, it's very telling that the most visible
progressive offer to oppose Hillary has come not from any top-name progressive Democrat, but from independent
Bernie Sanders--not a Democrat at all-- who
would run as a Democrat only as a strategic necessity, in a corrupt two-party
system, of being a viable presidential candidate. Which makes us strongly
suspect that Democrat's vaunted "Warren wing"--the only thing holding
progressives' interest in the party at all--is a hapless paper tiger. And we as
progressives have a life-or-death interest in finding out.

But here's the good news: in our deep skepticism lies our strength. For if we, like the hard-core Left,
had simply written Democrats off, they, with no prospect of obtaining our votes, would have no motive to please us. But instead--provided we unite in loudly advertising our
skepticism--Democrats find themselves with plenty. For, though a minority among
potential Democratic voters, we certainly have the numbers to cost them
elections. And if we put the Warren wing to the test and it fails, we can amplify our power to cost Democrats
elections by using social media--a thing we're quite adept at--to advertise that
failure to the voting public.

See, the question facing us as progressives is whether we
can elect anyone to office who'll
represent us. Now, if you're a true progressive, someone who could answer yes
to all the questions starting this
article, you understand the life-or-death importance of that question. For not
only do all progressive positions hang together by an inner logic of their
own--that progressives view progress as making a decent life possible for all human beings--but the climate-change
emergency has made fulfilling the progressive agenda more urgent for humanity
ever. As Naomi Klein argues--convincingly and attractively--in This Changes Everything, there's an
extremely sunny side to tackling our dire climate crisis: that the actions
needed to meet our climate emergency automatically entail fulfilling some of
progressives' fondest dreams for humanity. For without a world of peace, global
cooperation, and widespread human empowerment (which entails vastly greater economic justice and equality), it will be simply impossible
for humanity to meet its climate crisis. Which means that we urgently need
people sharing the climate justice vision--which is essentially the progressive
one--dominating global government. For
humanity now faces its most radical fork in the road: a peaceful, vastly more progressive
world or a Mad Max descent into climate Armageddon.

- Advertisement -

With so much at stake, we can no longer tolerate a U.S.
two-party system that doesn't represent progressives at all. Which is precisely what we get with today's hopelessly
corporatist Republican Party and a Democratic Party dominated by Hillary
Clinton and her oligarch donors. Democrats' Warren wing, in humanity's urgent
crisis, offers the only prospect of
progressives seizing control of the world's most powerful government anytime soon.
And fortunately, both Warren and Bernie Sanders understand it will take a
movement to forward their progressive agenda among Democrats.
Unfortunately, they don't seem to understand how radical such a movement has to be.

That's where the Progressive Hammer campaign comes in. As Warren's and Sanders' potential best supporters, we must warn them in no
uncertain terms that we see zero hope
of progressives being represented under a Clinton presidency. And that
therefore, we categorically refuse to
vote for Hillary Clinton. As the politicians with the most stake in building a powerful
progressive movement, we leave it to Warren and Sanders what to do from there.

Probably the best result would be Warren running for
president with Sanders' full support--a result easy to foresee, based on
Sanders' own statements, if Warren agrees to run. Next best--though less likely
to result in a progressive as president--would be Sanders (or some well-known
progressive Democrat) running for president with Warren's full support. What is
utterly unacceptable is that Warren both refuses to run and refuses to drop her
support for Clinton in favor of Sanders or some progressive Democrat. In that
case, we must warn Warren and Sanders we see only the prospect of a hideous bait-and-switch:
Sanders running, losing the primaries without Warren's support, and throwing
his support to an utterly unreformed and unrepentant Hillary Clinton, who will
pick up undeserved legitimacy for her regressive
agenda from both Sanders' support and her two-faced use of his rhetoric. We
trust in the intelligence of
Hillary's oligarch donors (even more, their long-established speed-dial coziness with "Hill and Bill") to guarantee her
use of Sanders' rhetoric will be for betrayal--proving the Warren wing the
"paper tiger" we'd warned it would be.

Given the hapless, unelectable status of America's third
parties, the Warren wing and Sanders remain progressives' best hope. Warren and
Sanders have correctly grasped that they need a popular movement behind them to
gain the progressive agenda traction among deeply compromised Democrats. What they perhaps fail to grasp is that they need a movement fiercer and more radical than
themselves--a threatening movement fully ready to cost Hillary Clinton an election--if they
are not to prove progressive "paper tigers," useful idiots for a victorious
(and regressive) Clinton. As more
radical supporters, we could put some real ferocity
in Warren's and Sanders' tiger--enough, one hopes, to bring Hillary and her
donors to their knees.

That's the purpose of the Progressive Hammer campaign, an
initiative of the Pitchforks Against Plutocracy movement. The campaign has a
very simple purpose: to petition for a meeting between representatives of
various progressive causes (like the ones mentioned in this article's opening
paragraph) and both Elizabeth Warren
and Bernie Sanders, in order to warn them of our deep distrust--indeed, our
repudiation--of Hillary Clinton. To warn them, in fact, that we see a Democratic
Party with Hillary as its presidential candidate as deeply contemptuous of
progressives, and that we intend to return the compliment by taking our votes
elsewhere.

This might all seem shocking to those who've never seen
progressives stand up to Democrats in such fashion, who've tolerated an insane
amount of evil--like endless war, unconstitutional universal surveillance, and
deadly climate foot-dragging--from "lesser of two evil" Democrats, all for
fear of "those crazy Republicans." We frankly see today's Democrats as
Republicans' enablers, who, by their own Deep State and corporate-sponsored
evil, utterly lack the sane, principled moral "high ground" to challenge
Republican evil. How can you loudly denounce behavior you wish to engage in
yourself? Obama's refusal to prosecute the Bush war criminals--while continuing
their unjustifiable "global war on terror" by sneakier means--is probably the
most telling case in point. We have zero reason to expect better from war hawk
Hillary Clinton.

- Advertisement -

Humanity simply has too much at stake for progressives to
tolerate any longer the levels of regressive
evil we've seen from Democrats. We--whose actual policies the world needs most--have been burned too many times to
take flattering rhetoric at face value and not
look at actual record and oligarch donor ties. In these regards, Hillary
Clinton is simply an "epic fail."

Progressives must now grow hard, like the forged steel of an
industrial-strength hammer. For if we don't, we're sure to become Hillary
Clinton's nail. If you grasp the stake humanity now has in no longer
letting centrist Democrats pound us into place like a nail, please like our
Facebook page, thereby indicating your support for our urgent campaign. And
above all, sign our MoveOn petition to Warren and Sanders. In adding your
signature, you help forge the "Progressive Hammer."

Patrick Walker is co-founder of Revolt Against Plutocracy (RAP) and the Bernie or Bust movement it spawned. Before that, he cut his activist teeth with the anti-fracking and Occupy Scranton PA movements.
No longer with RAP, he actively seeks (more...)